Stung by criticism that there are too few ambulances on the road to respond to emergencies, Health Minister Gaétan Barrette announced on Wednesday that the provincial government is investing $28.2 million to buy 22 more vehicles while expanding coverage.

Montreal and Laval will receive 10 additional ambulances, Barrette said. This will translate into nearly 78,000 more hours of ambulance service in the metropolitan region.

“Over the course of the last few months, we have made significant strides in negotiations with the ambulance companies,” Barrette said in a statement during a news conference in Quebec City.

The minister’s announcement follows complaints from the public that ambulances have sometimes taken far too long to respond to life-and-death emergencies.

Two weeks ago, the union representing paramedics in the Quebec City area charged that three recent deaths could have been avoided if there had been more ambulances on the road.

Daniel Chouinard, president of the Fédération des employés du préhospitalier du Québec (FPHQ), welcomed the investment in ambulance services, but he argued that Barrette is reacting to a public outcry rather than planning ahead effectively.

“This is a pre-election announcement to calm people down, especially in the Quebec City area, where there have been some deaths because of ambulance delays,” Chouinard told the Montreal Gazette.

The new measures will mean that there will be more paramedics on the road, and slightly fewer ambulance drivers who are on standby at home, waiting for emergency calls.

The province’s paramedics work according to two types of shifts: standby and hourly. Across the province, the response time for paramedics working the standby shift ranges from five to 12 minutes, according to the FPHQ.

By comparison, the response time for those working the hourly shift ranges from one to five minutes, as these paramedics are already on the road.

During the summer, there were 120 ambulance standby shifts across Quebec, and in August the government converted a dozen to hourly shifts at a cost of $9.6 million. With Barrette’s latest announcement, the government will convert an additional nine standby shifts to hourly.

At issue is the expense. It costs the government almost double to pay paramedics working the hourly shift. There are 5,500 paramedics in the province.

Most of the standby shifts that have been converted to hourly are in outlying regions like Rouyn-Noranda, Val-d’Or, Cowansville, Thetford Mines, Sept-Îles, Baie-Comeau, Ormstown, Oka and St-Pamphile.

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